A Chance to Die Elisabeth Elliot (electronic reader .txt) 📖

As we have seen, the program for the Family had nothing approaching sex education except a few discreet references to the birds and the bees. If the many dogs in the compound ever engaged in any instructive performances, the lesson was apparently lost on most of the girls. The boys were initiated by having access to the cattle farm.

When a girl reached puberty, she was given a supply of blue and white cloths, but no explanation was offered as to exactly what the process was all about. Indeed, the accals themselves who mothered them had no idea. It was simply something women put up with. Although sex plays a central part in the life of Indian villagers and in their religion (the villages are full of phallic symbols), a girl in a strict Indian home might know no more than a Dohnavur girl. One who was married at the age of twelve later asked her mother why she had not prepared her. “It is the husband’s duty to teach his wife” was the answer.

And all these babies who appeared from time to time? Where, exactly, did they come from? “We thought the Lord laid them in the mother’s bed,” one of the “Old Girls” told me. Their ignorance is not quite so incredible as it may sound, since Dohnavur women seldom went out where they might have seen a pregnant woman.

It was not until the hospital was built and the accals began to care for patients that they were initiated into the astonishing truth. Since it was not a matter to be discussed among themselves, many bizarre distortions were believed. When one of the accals married an annachie, she was so poorly prepared for what he expected that she felt she was sinning grievously. It was not until the 1940s that sex education was introduced, and that only because younger missionaries insisted on it and were willing to teach it. Someone sent a book for children about how babies are made. Amy gave permission to one of the Indian women to show it to another, if her sittie consented.

“I shall never forget the first time I saw the pictures of a little baby in the [Tamil word for cradle] God makes for it—the first cradle, I mean,” wrote Amy. “It helps one to understand what the words mean, ‘He humbled Himself.’ ”

As late as 1946, according to one of the doctors, the ignorance was extraordinary. She spoke to Amma about it, suggesting that even the married couples led a monastic life. She listened, admitted failure, and promised to try to make amends.

There were some strange separations. Not only did Amy Carmichael condone the separation of husband and wife, she was at least partly responsible for arranging it when she felt the work required it. She moved one Indian couple, who had been with her in the work for years, away from their own children to Muppanthal, the place where the retarded were cared for. There was no adequate housing for them, and the wife finally returned to Dohnavur while the husband went off to live in the forest with a ranger. They were never all together as a family again. A Syrian Christian man lived and worked in Dohnavur, visiting his wife, who lived in Kerala, only once a year. One couple who left Hinduism to join them was kept separate for a time. When allowed to be together again, they produced more children than Arnma thought fitting. Contraceptives were unknown to her, but why not practice continence? Long walks, the husband found, did not always “cool him off.” When one of the sitties married, she was separated not from her husband but from the girls she had been caring for—marriage was “too exciting” for them. Amy preferred that they not hear things which might arouse desire.

Marriages within the Family, Indian or European, were few and far between. The Europeans, of course, had come to India forsaking all, which Amma took for granted in nearly all cases included the desire for marriage. As for the Indians, she had difficulty believing that her boys were good enough for her girls. It was often said that the men’s work was spiritually at a lower level than the women’s. “Men always are,” said an English doctor who worked there, “but the corollary was not drawn!”

An Indian who had come to Dohnavur as an adolescent was particularly close to Amma. She used to ask him his innermost thoughts. “Have you any girls in mind, my dear boy?” she said one day.

“Well, maybe so-and-so.”

“Oh no, she doesn’t fit into your life.”

He accepted her judgment. Later he chose another who had Amy’s approval, but the girl rejected his proposal.

“Wait until she agrees,” was Amy’s advice. People in Dohnavur usually agreed. He waited six months, during which he says no pressure was applied. When Amy asked again on his behalf, the girl consented.

A sittie in her early twenties longed to be married but did not dare to mention her feelings. Surely Amma had no such temptations, no idea of the torture of desire others experienced—how could one broach such a subject to her?

“Oh, but she would have understood,” said another, “although one would have hesitated to speak of it.” Why? “Well, because she was so . . . No, if a person felt it right to be married Amma would have accepted that.”

A young Englishman went to Dohnavur, leaving his fiancée, who had also been accepted, to follow him to India later. Health and family difficulties delayed her arrival for years. During this time Amma wrote to her as though she were the most beloved of daughters, “ownest own,” as she often called her, though of course they had not met. Never did a mother pour out tenderer sympathy and deeper understanding on a daughter than Amma poured on this girl on the other side of the world. “The Lord, who is your Dearest of all, can satisfy. He